I take Mr. Toto from him, telling him, "And now the fifty dollars."
Bacardi snorts, his shoulders slumping, rounded, and his mouth hanging so slack that his heavy, square chin hides the locket, almost resting on his shaved pecs. "Dude.," Bacardi says, "how come?"
Now, me with my hand out, cupped palm up, I say, "Because Dan Banyan was a lot of house payments and car payments and credit-card interest ago. Because right now you need a pill and I need the funds."
From across the room, number 72's walking this way. Not all at once. He takes a couple steps to the buffet, where he eats a potato chip. He takes another step to stand next to the talent wrangler, says something in her ear, and she flips through the sheets on her clipboard. All this time, he's working a big circle back toward Bacardi and me.
The talent wrangler shouts, "Gentlemen, may I have your attention?" Looking at her clipboard, she shouts, "May I have the following three performers…"
Men at the buffet stop chewing. The veterans freeze, the plastic razors hovering over the leather of their calf muscles and glutes. The men holding mobile phones to one ear, or wearing cordless headsets, they stop talking, silent, and lift their heads to listen.
"Number 21.," the wrangler shouts. "Number 283. and number 544." She smooths the papers on her clipboard and lifts one arm straight overhead to wave her hand in the air. "Right this way, gentlemen," she says.
I shake the pill bottle, half empty now, so the remainder of the pills rattle, and I say, "That was a close call." I say, "Now, fifty dollars, or take that pill you're safeguarding."
Branch Bacardi breathes in, the pecs and lats and obliques of him ballooning huge, and he breathes out one long, breath-minted sigh. "So," he says, "you really hung out with Dolly Parton?"
My pulse pounding in my ears, I close one eye. Open it. Close my other eye. Open it. I'm not going blind, not yet.
And a voice says, "Can I talk to you?" A man's voice.
Wouldn't you know it? Here's number 72, standing close by, only a couple steps behind Bacardi and me.
One of his brown fingers tapping the gold locket, the fingernail outlined in darker brown, Bacardi says, "This pill, one of them miracle drugs." Tapping the locket, he says, "Don't matter what's wrong, dude, this here will cure you." His smile flat-lines, those fake teeth disappeared behind his tanned lips, and Branch Bacardi says, "This baby will cure anything."
To the young man, number 72, I lean over a little, brushing my fingers over the top of my head so he can see, and I say, "Is my hair really getting thin?"
12. Sheila
Ms. Wright jogs along a sidewalk, her knees pumping waist-high in front of her, thighs stretched tight inside black bicycle shorts. Breasts bouncing, swinging side to side, strapped inside a white sports bra. Elbows bent L-shaped, hands limp and flapping loose at each wrist. Feet slapping the concrete sidewalk in tennis shoes.
Her stomach skin, tight and tan. No stretch marks. Nothing to show for being a mother.
At her crotch, the black spandex stretches to cover a small bulge. Bigger than camel toe. Swelling bigger than moose knuckle. Way bigger than a clit. Ms. Wright's crotch swells, bulges, bounces. Another stride, her foot stamping concrete, and the bump inside her bicycle shorts starts to inch down one spandex leg.
We're jogging alongside a park of green grass. Ms. Wright, glancing at the pages of a three-ring binder I carry. Each page, a clear plastic sleeve that shows six Polaroid snapshots. Each picture a man's head and shoulders numbered in black felt-tipped pen along the bottom edge. The six hundred—plus vein-drainers who signed aboard our project. These shank-shuckers and baby-barfers. The tadpole-tossers who passed their hepatitis screening. With one hand, I grip the top edge of the binder, pressing it into my waist. My other hand turns each page, my fingers twisted around a pen.
With every footfall, the binder bruises my bellybutton. The heavy hundred-plus pages.
The bump inside Ms. Wright's shorts, it stops a moment, hung up by the elastic band around the bottom of the leg. The spandex and elastic bend, blossom, burp, and a pink ball drops, shining wet, bouncing one, two, three dark spots of damp on the gray concrete.
Ms. Wright says, "Fuck." Whispers the word, slapping her leg where the ball slipped out.
The pink ball bounces four, five, six spots backward on the sidewalk behind us. Seven, eight, nine wet spots, and a dog leaps from the grass to snatch the ball in its teeth. This black dog—sleek as a seal on stick legs, small as a cat with pointed ears—its black gums snap shut on the pink ball, and the dog races away across the grassy park.
Stopped, watching the dog shrink, smaller and farther, Ms. Wright says, "You know that movie, Wizard of Oz?" She says, "The dog that played Toto was a cairn terrier named Terry." Watching her pink ball disappear in the distance, Ms. Wright says, "In the scene where the witch's guards, they chase Toto out of the castle, in the final take, one of the guards, halfway across the castle drawbridge, he made a flying tackle and landed on poor Terry. Broke the Toto dog's back leg."
The dog was off the picture for weeks. True fact.
Back to jogging, her knees pumping, her hands flapping loose, Ms. Wright keeps talking. That same Wizard of Oz movie, the actor Buddy Ebsen almost died from an allergic reaction to aluminum dust, part of his costume as the Tin Woodsman. The actor Margaret Hamilton was supposed to leave Munchkinland in a ball of flames, only the flash fire ignited her green copper-oxide makeup, setting fire to her face and right hand.
Buddy Ebsen lost his part to Jack Haley. Margaret Hamilton lay in bed for six weeks, wrapped in gauze and Butesin Picrate.
Ms. Wright glances down at the six Polaroids I'm holding. The next six cum-casters and pudding-pullers. Jogging along, she says, "Actors have done lots worse stuff for their craft."
The pink ball, she says it was molded from silicone. Two-point-five ounces. Twenty millimeters in diameter. A Kegel exercise. You put the ball inside and tense your pelvic floor. Used to be, Asian women would insert two metal balls with mercury inside their hollow cores. The mercury would shift all day, rolling the balls, stimulating the women, getting them hotter as the weight of the balls strengthened their pussy muscle. Their husbands came home, and those revved-up housewives would fuck them at the front door.
True fact.
Too bad the mercury would tend to leak out, Ms. Wright says. Drive them nuts. Poison them to death.
Nowadays, most Asian girls go around with jade balls inside. The stronger you get, the more weight you can carry.
Jogging now, the crotch of her shorts swell. The spandex stretches thin, the color going from black to dark gray. Another stride, and something pops out the elastic leg. Thuds on the sidewalk, ricocheting, skipping, skidding, to land in the gutter. Round as a tennis ball, white, but smooth and veined as marble or onyx stone.
It's a Kegel-exercise stone, Ms. Wright says, stooping to lift it with both hands. Two and one-half pounds. Wiping the stone against the leg of her shorts, brushing dead leaves and grains of dirt from it, Ms. Wright says, "A couple months of hauling this, and my pussy could go to the Olympics…"
All of this, training for World Whore Three.
She says a real movie star is willing to suffer. In that Singin' in the Rain movie from 1952, the actor Gene Kelly danced the title song, take after take, for days, with a fever of 103 degrees. To make the rain look right on film, the production used water mixed with milk, and there was Gene Kelly, dog-sick but splashing and soaked in sour milk, smiling happy as the best day in his life.